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American publisher set to release Carol Campbell’s ‘My Children Have Faces’

North American rights to Carol Campbell’s highly acclaimed first novel, My Children Have Faces, which centres on the karretjiemense – nomadic indigenous people of South Africa who criss-cross the Karoo on donkey carts – have been acquired by Waveland Press.
Campbell’s fascinating novel tells the story of a family of karretjiemense desperately trying to avoid a cruel individual who wants to harm them.

Karretjiemense are particularly vulnerable to crime: their births aren’t registered and they carry no ID documents, making even the most rudimentary engagement with the police impossible.

In My Children Have Faces, an illiterate mother must battle to prove that her children “have faces”, that they exist officially, in order to protect them from a killer.

A journalist who has worked for the Argus, the Cape Times and the Mercury, Carol Campbell currently lives in Durban with her family.

Her most recent novel, Esther’s House, focuses on corruption in government housing for previously disadvantaged communities. Both her novels have been translated into Afrikaans.